Get started with Delta Lake
Delta Lake in Azure Databricks is an advanced storage layer that brings reliability, security, and performance to big data processing. It's built on top of Apache Spark and enhances the capabilities of traditional data lakes by offering several key benefits:
ACID transactions
Delta Lake provides ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactions, ensuring data integrity with multiple concurrent reads and writes. This means when you update or modify the data, the integrity, and consistency of the data are maintained, preventing issues like data corruption or incomplete data reads. Delta Lake optimizes working with large volumes of metatdata at scale, despite traditional data lakes struggling with large volumes of metadata. This ensures efficient operations when you use it over large volumes of data.
Data versioning
Delta Lake ensures that the data adheres to a defined schema, preventing errors due to unexpected or missing data types. It allows for schema evolution without downtime, enabling modifications to the schema as new data fields are introduced. Delta Lake supports data versioning, allowing you to access and revert to earlier versions of data for audits or rollbacks. This feature is useful for reproducing experiments, audits, and for fixing data corruption.
Simplification and performance
Delta Lake treats batch and streaming data as the same entity, simplifying the data pipeline architecture. You can use a single table that can serve as both a batch source and a streaming source or sink, enabling complex operations to be performed more easily. In Delta Lake, features like data compaction and indexing improve read and write speeds. Delta Lake optimizes the layout of data at storage level, which enhances query performance.
Integration
Being a part of the Databricks platform, Delta Lake is deeply integrated with other Databricks services. This integration provides the users an experience that allows for the development of sophisticated analytics applications on a unified platform.
These features make Delta Lake suited for enterprises needing to manage large volumes of data with high reliability and performance within the Azure Databricks ecosystem.